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The brother who Omar Soltan remembers was a big man, easily more than 200 pounds, with a broad, bright-eyed smile below thick-framed glasses. The brother he saw online, in a video leaked from a prison in Egypt earlier this year, looks like an entirely different man.

He is gaunt, a wisp of that linebacker frame. The lines in his face look deeper. “He looks much, much worse,” Omar said. “His situation is really bad now.”

Mohamed Soltan, 26, an Egyptian-American and graduate of Ohio State University, had participated in a protest against the military takeover of the government in August in Cairo. He was shot in the arm during that protest while working with international journalists to document violence by the military. Egyptian police arrested him at his home days later.

He was charged with planning an act of terror and for supporting a banned organization –– the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that controlled the government before the coup. His father, Salah Soltan, is a professor who backed the Brotherhood, but Mohamed had been a vocal critic of the group.

Still, a judge decided on Jan. 26 to keep him in jail while investigators gathered evidence. He has been on a hunger strike since then and has lost 90 pounds, family members said. He can no longer walk. Even after being given forced injections of glucose, he was hospitalized in critical condition last month.

Now, he’s back in jail.

In a January video leaked from prison, Soltan appealed to President Barack Obama for help. Seated in front of a black background, Soltan said he’s being persecuted for upholding American values.

“I graduated from the Ohio State University. I’m a damn-proud Buckeye,” he said. “I’ve been languishing in an Egyptian prison for over six months. For almost 200 days I’ve had my freedom stripped away from me. Why? Because I was living by the same values and principles that our founding fathers built this great nation on: freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Officials from the U.S. Department of State have visited Soltan to monitor his health, a spokesman for the department said.

“We routinely seek consular visits with Mr. Soltan and arranged for him to be seen by an outside physician to assess his condition,” Noel Clay wrote in an email. “We continue to raise this case with Egyptian officials at the highest levels.”

Soltan was born in Egypt but moved to the U.S. and gained dual-citizenship when he was young. His family moved from Boston to Kansas City to Detroit before settling in Columbus. After Soltan graduated from Hilliard Davidson High School, he enrolled at OSU to study economics.

But even here, his family faced trouble.

In January 2012, Soltan escaped an arson fire at his family’s Hilliard home that the FBI investigated as a hate crime. Months earlier, someone had painted anti-Islamic slurs on the house on Britton Farms Drive. By that time, Mohamed’s father, a controversial Muslim scholar, had returned to Egypt.

Mohamed headed overseas soon after. Once he finished his economics degree at OSU, he took a job with an oil company in Egypt. The move was in part to be closer to his mother, who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, Omar said. But Mohamed quickly left the job, inspired to work for democracy amid the military coup that ousted President Mohammed Morsi.

“He speaks very well, English and Arabic,” said Omar, 20, who is studying political science at George Mason University near Washington, D.C. “He became a volunteer journalist.”

The bullet that hit Soltan on Aug. 14 shattered the bone in his upper arm. He had been on a platform in Rabaa Square talking to foreign journalists when the shooting started. By the end, more than 600 people were killed as Egyptian security forces cleared the massive sit-in.

In a letter smuggled from prison, Soltan describes how metal screws in his arm –– inserted by a surgeon before he was arrested –– had started to pierce his skin, but that the prison refused to give him medical help. He wrote that another inmate removed the screws in a gruesome cell-floor surgery.

At occasional court dates, a judge has continued to extend Soltan’s detention, Omar said. Photos of a recent court visit show Soltan frail and reclining on an orange cot, his head listing to one side.

If the U.S. government is working to help free Soltan, his family members said it hasn’t shown. Friends have started online petitions to rally for support. The Muslim Student Association at Ohio State has hosted events in support of Soltan. OSU officials said they haven’t been asked to help.

“We would just continue to encourage he and his family to work through the resources that are available at the Congressional level,” OSU spokesman Gary Lewis said.

At least one member of Congress, Minneapolis Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has called for the immediate release of Soltan. But in the online video that Soltan recorded in January, he directs his message to Obama, whom he said he campaigned for in 2008.

“With your continued silence, you, sir, are saying that there are in fact different variations of American, and my type in this period in this time just happens to be the one that matters less –– or not at all,” he said.

“I know now more than ever that freedom isn’t free. It isn’t cheap at all. If I have to pay the price with my life, then I do it for God and country.”